Longfellow's anthology of Italian short stories, with selections ranging from Giovanni Boccaccio's "Fra Cipolla" to the "Fantasmi Notturni" by the eighteenth-century philosopher Francesco Soave. Among Longfellow's selections was Niccolò Machiavelli's misogynistic but entertaining Favola: Belfagor arcidiavolo che prese moglie (1469), a novella about a devil who gets married and finds out that he prefers Hell to the infernal reality of married life ("Belphegor" is among the texts studied by the high-strung Roderick Usher in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher").